A Review of Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ

Derouchie, Jason S. 2024. Delighting in the Old Testament: Through Christ and for Christ. Wheaton, IL: Crossway. 337 pp.

In Delighting in the Old Testament, Jason Derouchie provides a needed corrective of the practical Marcionism endemic to much of western evangelical Christianity. Derouchie opens by providing ten reasons the Old Testament matters for Christians, adapted from his earlier How to Understand and Apply the Old Testament (P&R, 2017), and then uses both Old and New Testament texts to demonstrate how authors under both covenants understood the Old Testament to apply to the new covenant audience (chapters 1–2). In the light of Jesus fulfilling the old covenant, Derouchie argues that Christ is the lens through which the Old Testament is rightly interpreted and understood (chapter 3). In order to lay the foundation for an interpretive framework, five successive covenants are identified within the Old Testament for understanding the trajectory of redemption history (chapter 4). In addition, Christ in the Old Testament may be identified through direct messianic predictions, the similarities and contrasts within salvation history, identifying Old Testament types, recognizing the Lord’s identity and activity, noting Old Testament ethical ideals, and using the Old Testament to instruct others (chapter 5). This seven-fold rubric is then applied to a reading of Genesis (chapter 6).

Derouchie next develops Walter Kaiser’s concept of the Lord’s promise-plan in chapters seven through nine in order to demonstrate how Old Testament promises and curses are fulfilled in Christ as a corrective to health, wealth, and prosperity teaching. Chapter 10 builds upon Brian Rosner’s principles for describing how biblical authors repudiated, replaced, and reappropriated the Mosaic law through Christ and then develops a method for identifying how Old Testament texts may be maintained (with or without extension), transformed, or annulled through the lens of Christ. On this foundation, Derouchie critiques the Westminster Confession’s traditional tripartite division of the moral, civil, and ceremonial law, as well as theonomy, legalism, antinomianism, and Marcionism. The framework of maintaining, transforming, and annulling the law is then illustrated in chapters 12 and 13 by application to specific texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Derouchie tackles quite a large topic and provides much thought-provoking discussion. Pastors and teachers will find much in this book to use in developing teaching materials for instructing churches in how to read and understand the Old Testament. This is both a positive statement providing an interpretive framework for Christological interpretation, as well as a corrective of such misapplications as health and wealth preaching and theonomy. Moreover, I found the development of Walter Kaiser’s promise-plan schema helpful for thinking through in more systematic fashion how Old Testament promises apply today.

However, I tend to agree with Kaiser’s continued use of the Westminster Confession’s tripartite division in Toward Old Testament Ethics (Zondervan Academic, 1991), and see alternate schemas such as maintaining, transforming, and annulling the law as more problematic and less encompassing than the traditional Westminster formulation. For example, Jesus’ intensification of the Ten Commandments to heart motives within Matthew 5 does not seem to fit neatly into Derouchie’s tripartite division as it was described. Moreover, the Westminster tripartite division is substituted in Derouchie’s schema by a five-fold division consisting of criminal, civil, family, cultic/ceremonial, and compassion laws (pp. 238–39), which, similar to the Westminster formulation, are not emic legal categories articulated in Scripture itself. Rather, an emic schema would be Jesus’s summary of the Law in terms of love of God (Deut 6:5) and love of neighbor (Lev 19:18), which played such a large role in St. Augustine’s interpretive framework of the two-fold love. On this point, Derouchie focuses on the love of neighbor in his interpretive method, while not identifying the love of God as a methodological consideration (e.g. p. 199)—although I doubt he would dispute the centrality of love for God in the interpretation of the Old Testament!

Finally, most of the examples and applications are drawn from the Pentateuch (Genesis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy), with only passing mention of the Psalms and Prophets. A more thorough treatment would have considered the Christological interpretation of the Historical Books, the burgeoning discussions of the Messiah in the Psalms from the last two decades, Christ as our wisdom, and a more detailed treatment of Christ as the lens for reading the prophets.

Terrance R. Wardlaw, Jr.
Dallas International University